Pages

Monday, December 7, 2009

Finding Balance

Lately God’s been talking to me a lot about balance. I think it all started with the Target Commercial leading up to Black Friday. The commercials featured two sisters preparing for their Black Friday shopping. One sister was manic about Christmas and needed everything to be perfect and better than anyone else. The other sister was more laid back and lazy about it. As I watched those commercials I found that I identified with both. I feel the tendency to be perfect and make everything a competition lurking inside me. But, I also find myself laughing at that impulse and feeling like it’s all too much work.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve discovered this tension within myself. I seem to spend my time on one extreme end of the spectrum or the other; never able to just rest myself on the fulcrum between. I’m overly social – having to spend every night with friends. Then I become a hermit and don’t want to leave my house or see anyone. I become indulgent and spend way too much money on going out to eat, shopping and splurges. Then I become a tightwad and won’t spend a cent on anything or anyone. I commit myself to spending daily time with God and find myself drawing closer to Him and growing in my knowledge of Him as I have meaningful times of devotion and worship. Then I’ll go weeks…months…without opening my Bible.

This inability to find a middle ground is unsettling at the least. I understand that there’s a natural cycle to life…an ebb and flow to our routines and habits. But does it have to be so extreme?! I don’t believe it does and I feel like God has shown this to me to help me learn to find my center in Him and find balance.

James 1 speaks against being double-minded. James says, The man who doubts “should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.” (v 7-8) Now James is talking specifically about someone who doubts when they ask God for wisdom, but I feel like this correlates to what God’s been showing me. When I allow myself to live at extremes I am unstable and double-minded in how I’m living. I don’t expect that there won’t be days where I feel more social than others or have more consistent times of devotions than others. What I feel God’s calling me to is to make them “days” that are different instead of whole periods of time.

So, instead of identifying with both Target sisters because I can be each of them at different times, I want to find the middle ground between the crazy, perfectionist and the lazy, just-get-byer.